Click.TV Pitch Program Is Public Relations Not Blogger Relations

The reason I characterize this as a Blogger Relations Program, John, is that I approached it differently than I would a media pitch based on characteristics of the blogosphere. Each email was personalized; there were no blasts of email to anybody. Each email was based on what I knew about the blogger. I had no direct message I was seeking the participants in the program to publish; I just wanted to offer awareness and provide access to the product so they could do and/or write anything they wished -- or nothing at all. And, of course, it was focused specifically on bloggers. But in the end, the goal IS to stimulate conversation around videos that participants will create and post themselves, something that could never happen in a media relations effort.

Hope that clarifies...

Hmmm.. I'd have to look at your emails. But I was wondering if you considered them pitches. That's how I thought you described your click.TV campaign in the podcast.

I think your practice in this case sounded great and the right course of action. Good solid public relations tactics and strategy.

But I respectfully think that what you were doing was PR rather than blogger relations. I don't expect you or anyone else to necessarily agree with me on this point, and it might be that my definition does not hold up in the court of public opinion. Which is okay. Maybe we should chat about this as text sometimes loses some of the nuances.

After all any good PR professional would take the same steps in pitching their client's product to professional journalists. The PR professional would read some of the journalist's articles before sending an email or calling to check the journalist would be interested in writing about the review. And the PR person would send a personal email. To me whether sent to bloggers or journalists such communications are public relations. Though I will say that when the world invented the term media relations it made sense to describe the process of pitching to people in the media as building a relationship with them. Precisely because there was no mechanism to connect directly with the media other than PR techniques I want to highlight how I define the term.

It's that opportunity to have a conversation with a blogger even if the blogger is a journalist through a blog that distinguishes the new profession of blogger relations. The open nature of that communication puts constraints and opens up opportunities for both participants. While in the traditional setting of media relations you would never see a PR professional critiquing a journalist, or in some cases bothering to answer a minor question. With blogging there are some new rules. I think it's helpful to companies to distinguish between the two terms.

To me blogger relations is what you and I are doing now discussing a topic through the medium of a blog.

I know this is a matter of semantics, but I genuinely believe that there are benefits to the professions of blogging and public relations if we separate the two activities. I came to blog about corporate blogging through the Internet marketing industry, and found myself in the PR blogosphere community because everyone in that community talks about the issues I share the same passion for, corporate blogging! But I think PR is not the only profession that has given its expertise to the profession of blogger relations. And many PR bloggers would give advice to their clients to approach blogging authentically, focusing on conversation rather than marketing or PR. That's the reason why I distinguish between the two terms.

Chuck Tanowitz might have an even better definition, that of open communications. I just don't think that term will catch on as well at blogger relations.

Good post and podcast by the way, I think the click.TV technology looks really cool.

I'll chew on this, John. I would have thought what you and I were doing here was a simple conversation; there is no program element to it. A blogger relations program, as I have viewed it, is a component of PR, given my definition of PR as the strategic, coordinated effort to manage the process by which an organization engages and communicates with its various constituent publics. Bloggers are a public, same as media, government, activists, customers, employees, shareholders, analysts, local communities, the list goes on. Each public is unique in its characteristics and concerns. Bad PR blasts press releases out to handle all of them. Good PR recognizes the nuances and approaches them in ways that will achieve planned and measurable objectives.

I suppose I could come up with a new term for it, but hell, we haven't even settled on vidcasting or vlogging or video blogging or video blogging...

In any case, if I, in the course of this comment, asked you for a favor, that might be considered a pitch, too. Are the two mutually exclusive?

I also wonder if you think Andy Abramson's Nokia n90 blogger relations effort (his term) was not a blogger relations effort? Or even Edelman's ill-fated Wal*Mart experiment?

I do believe my effort was designed to inspire conversation, and I have had several with the individuals who have responded to my initial query...and hope to have many more. I also hope to inspire them to have conversations among themselves, although this hasn't happened yet. Alas, I am behind in producing an update on the effort. I have, I'm afraid, been preoccupied by blog trolls.

In any case, I'm glad you like Click.TV. My enthusiasm for it is the primary reason I took on the assignment -- the first time I've ever worked with a startup or a small company. (My usual client base is Fortune 1000.) If you have a video you'd like to apply to it, let me know; I'm sure I can make arrangements for you to try it out.

Yes I agree that our discussion is a conversation, the purpose of which is I hope to understand each other's perspectives, and hopefully to learn from each other. A real conversation is what blogging is all about. I think that companies will not succeed with blogging unless their bloggers understand it's more important to build a connection with an audience rather than trying to sell the reader something. Which is the irony I suppose by not selling you succeed in promoting your brand.

Companies have different goals for blogging, including thought leadership, customer service, product development and more. Some companies have all of the above as their goals for blogging. Product development is definitely not PR, and that's just one reason I think effective blogger relations goes beyond PR.

Blogging amazes me because companies can implement the marketing concept fully, and through the process of getting feedback from customers actually gain promotional benefits. I define the marketing concept to be the process of understanding the needs and wants of a customer and satisfying those needs efficiently and profitably. If companies are using blogging for many goals, how then can we define blogger relations just to be the sole strategy of PR? If I can go further, would you include product marketing in the definition of PR? How do we as an industry reconcile the contributions and benefits of blogging for companies when its implementation has been so much more than PR? See the Backbone Media Corporate blogging case studies for illustrations.

I've always thought that PR provides so much to the discipline of blogging and one reason I tend to hang out in the PR community blogosphere. My article "PR - The next internet revolution," written in September of 2003 hopefully illustrates why I never forget the huge debt blogging owes to the older sibling of public relations. PR people get the whole conversation idea; the strategy is in their blood.

Your right about the relevance of words, I think my insistence on the difference comes from a concern that people will perceive blogging to be just PR. Again there's nothing wrong with PR, I just think that blogging as PR and much more.

I've review Andy Abramson's Nokia n90 campaign previously and I see the program both a good PR effort and a good blogger relations program. Andy developed a traditional product review program. He sent out letters to the participants involved. That program is PR; he called it a blogger relations program because instead of contacting journalists in the traditional media he contacted bloggers. He was using the term blogger relations in the same way that we now use the term media relations. In some ways blogger relations is a good term to use for a description of how Andy connected with the bloggers who reviewed the Nokia phone. I define blogger relations differently. But if we use the term in this way, that's exactly how society will define blogger relations. Society may have missed the biggest element of blogging that results are produced from simple conversations rather than promotional efforts.

I come to blogging from the search engine optimization industry. Good search engine advice parallels good PR advice; have the right story to tell your audience and they will be interested and come back for more. There are three factors to getting a high ranking in search engines, relevant content, links and building a website that's accessible by search engines. Provide good content that interesting and relevant to your audience and you will get higher rankings. The secret of building the most relevant websites on the planet is why sites like wikipedia and craigslist.org work so well, there's a cheap (free) mechanism for generating content, and the multiple authors and audience link back to that content. And why those sites have high rankings for high volume and obscure terms a like.

I can contrast a company's efforts to get a high ranking on the organic section of a search engine with buying pay per click ads on Google Adwords. Often the goal of a PPC campaign is to get sales leads, and the strategy to get leads is by paying ads on Google. The goal and strategy are very similar.

In contrast with organic search engine optimization, the goal may still be sales, but the strategy is different, develop relevant content. As an industry good SEO marketing people understand it's more important to develop relevant content for your audience than trying to sell to them immediately that produces high rankings. That's why blogging is such a natural for the SEO industry; many of the industry's practitioners were already helping their clients to build content relevant websites. If SEO is such a natural for blogging, why don't we call blogger relations an SEO tactic? I would not by the way. :-) Again to me SEO like PR is part of blogger relations and includes many more disciplines.

Andy Abramson's Nokia n90 blogger relations campaign succeeded because he targeted those people who were most interested in the cell phone. Yet Andy did something beyond the initial connection, he continued the conversation, with complete transparency. He wrote blog posts about every mention of his campaign good or bad, and linked back to all blog posts. He even commented on the other bloggers entries good or bad. That element of the campaign, the conversation was where Andy was conducting effective blogger relations, but his initial program was public relations.

Regarding your request for a favor, that depends on whether your want to borrow a book or have me link to one of your client's sites. :-)

Click.TV is lucky to have such a passionate proponent working for them. Your efforts do inspire further conversation because you described the relevancy of their service to you. But again I think there is a difference between highlighting a company within the context of a conversation within your community and actively pitching community members about a new product. To me one is effective blogger relations and the other is public relations. I hasten to add that there's nothing wrong with either approach.

Lastly, let me think about the video, I'd probably pick something from one of the Mars trips from NASA. It would be interesting to get geologists to comment on the video with their views about the images.

We're in absolute agreement, John. It's really a matter of semantics. I fear that "blogger relations program" has already assumed the meaning that Andy and I have ascribed to it, which (if memory serves) I picked up from other writing. By all means, though, fight the good fight against it before it assumes the mantle of common usage. I still hate the word "page" as in "web page," because it's not. I'll never win that fight, but I'll keep on fighting anyway.

What word or phrase do you use instead of page for different sections within a website?

I think the process of blogger relations as I define the term is something new in the field of business communications. If we did not use the BR term for that definition how should we define that process?

I think its a matter of having the term mean both the process of contacting bloggers to pitch a company and to have a discussion with another blogger.